Keen On America

Is the convicted sex criminal Roman Polanski worth defending? Particularly in the context of “An Officer and a Spy”, his vaguely autobiographical 2019 movie about the Dreyfus case, the first Polanski…

It's become the new orthodoxy: social media is the cause of the epidemic of anxiety amongst adolescents. So the way to fix this is by taking away their smartphones. But according to Pulitzer prize-wi…

Shaka Senghor is one of America’s great survivors. Having spent 19 years in high-security prison, he has reinvented himself as a best-selling writer and public speaker on individual freedom and respo…

It hasn’t always been easy being Gary Marcus these last few years. OpenAI’s most persistently outspoken AI sceptic has been in minority, sometimes of one, in his critique both of Sam Altman’s claims …

Maybe he never went away. But Dr Strangelove is back now at the heart of America’s new military-industrial-digital complex. And Strangelove 2.0 might offer an even more existential threat than Kubric…

What’s the matter with America? We’ve been told for years about the dumb working class MAGA voter. That they are exploited by Trump, that their interests are the reverse of a self-interested Republic…

For lonely young men who have forgotten how to read, the LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick some some simple advice: Get Queer Quicker. And to make her point, Patrick discusses five great books on…

Those who do win. Those are Keith Teare’s immortal words to describe the winners of today’s Silicon Valley battle to control tomorrow’s AI world. But the real question, of course, is what to do to wi…

Is the history of New York City the heart of the American story? Or does it exist in parallel, perhaps even independently, from the main American narrative. As with everything about the Big Apple (so…

It’s not often that there’s sunny news on the environmental front, especially from grizzled activists like the great Bill McKibben. But in his new book, Here Comes the Sun, McKibben argues that the s…

Who is to blame for the redistricting farce that many fear is breaking American democracy? There’s Trump, of course, and his gang of MAGA crazies. But according to David Daley, the author of Antidemo…

Might the supposedly revolutionary future of AI healthcare actually be a return to the gig economics of Uber and Airbnb? That’s the intriguing proposition put forward by former Kaiser Permanente Chi…

Anyone lucky enough to have seen Wim Wenders’ 2023 masterpiece Perfect Days is familiar with the dignity of professional Japanese toilet cleaners. Mark Eltringham, the publisher of the excellent futu…

Once upon a time, it was very easy for the American left to determine progress. The working class was good, the traditional left knew, and so progress meant embracing the economic and cultural intere…

Tech nostalgia. Winner-take-all economics. The cult of "storytelling". A Stanford educated aristocratic elite. This was the week that nothing changed in Silicon Valley. Alternatively, it was the week…

I’m not sure on this one. On the one hand, Isabelle Boemeke is a pin-up of an environmentally activist generation - going from superstar Brazilian model and Instagram influencer to the author of Rad …

Few of the world’s great scientists have given more thought to the existential threats to humanity than the irrepressible British cosmologist and astronomer Martin Rees. He’s the co-founder of Cambri…

So will AI wipe us out? According to Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, there's about a 10-20% chance of AI being humanity's final invention. Which, as the so-called Godfather of AI…

We all are familiar, of course, with Robert Altman’s classic 1971 movie about the settling of the west, McCabe and Mrs Miller. But most of us, I’m guessing, don’t know about another McCabe, this one …

Should we be defending American democracy if it never really existed? That’s the controversial thesis at the heart of Osita Nwanevu’s new book, The Right of the People. What America needs, the Baltim…